The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) 802.1AE standard is the media access control (MAC) security standard, commonly referred to as MACsec. MACsec defines connectionless data confidentiality and integrity for media access independent protocols. MACsec defines protocols to be met to implement security requirements for protecting data traversing networks, such as Ethernets and local area networks (LANs). The MACsec infrastructure may allow for data confidentiality, data integrity, and data origin authentication. For example, MACsec may allow for unauthorized LAN connections to be identified and excluded from communication within the network.
MACsec, when implemented into existing networks, is commonly implemented on either layer 2 (data link layer) and/or layer 3 (network layer) devices from the Open Systems Interconnection Reference Model (OSI model), such as switches and/or network controllers. Implementing MACsec into existing networks may require replacing the existing hardware of the network.